Iron Rage (19 page)

“I never thought this part would work,” Nataly admitted, despite her admonition of a second ago about premature celebration. “But if this part comes off…”

“That leaves a lot of work to do,” Jake said, starting to sound like his normal dour self again.

The first mate blew out a long breath. “It'll feel good to be able to do
something
,” she said. “Half-baked and hard as it may be, anything is better than scurrying helplessly back and forth like a mouse between cats. Or between battleships and muties.”

“You got that right,” Suzan said.

Coming from anybody else, Mildred reflected, as the launch putted back toward the shore where they all now stood except for those on the
Queen
, just upstream of the tug's bow, she would have taken the scheme as more hopeless than half-baked or even crazy. But J. B. Dix remained the most practical man on Earth. Or at least the most practical she'd ever met walking to and fro on it. In her own day or this one.

If he set out to do a thing, it was because he was certain he could do it, and had at least the glimmering of a plan as to how. And then, more often than not, he went and did it. Whatever it took.

She looked on the returning group with love, and not just for her lover. She was proud of them all. Even their temporary allies.

And she knew she could never get across to John her private reservations about his grand scheme for them and
Queen
. Though he knew a fair amount about it,
J.B. was no profound scholar of military history. Not the way Ryan was. His was interested primarily in all the weapons, neat toys and gadgets warriors had used over the ages.

And even Ryan cared little for the political and cultural context of the wars he'd studied and thought about. He was interested in the lessons he could derive from them to help him fight his own better.

Abner cut back the outboard motor at just the precise instant to allow the launch's pointy prow to slide up smoothly on a low patch of shore with short, dew-damp grass to lubricate its way. The barrier to J.B.'s understanding her misgivings about his plans was simply the times they had grown up in. Slavery was very real, and accepted as a thing that happened. Almost universally, in fact, or at least it wasn't uncommon and tended to crop up anywhere. Her friends all hated it. They'd fought a loose network of slavers whose reach encompassed the whole Deathlands and beyond. And Ricky had sworn eternal vengeance on them after they butchered his village, murdered his parents before his eyes and carried off his adored older sister, Yamile, into bondage. He was still obsessed with searching for her, and one of his main reasons for remaining with Ryan's group was to keep looking for her against all hope.

But to them slavery was just another thing coldhearts did. It didn't hold the horror for them it did for her. Because the idea that it would focus its evil on one group of people because of the different color of their skins was as alien to them as universally available electricity and running water. People hated and discriminated,
as they always had and always seemed to—whoever and wherever they were. But modern prejudices were directed against muties and their “taint” of not-quite-humanity. Normal humans—norms—of all descriptions were “us” against the mutie “them,” even if the muties were otherwise norm or even exemplary people, like Krysty, say. They were despised and even feared scarcely less than the vaguely humanoid and outright monstrous stickies, or the barely better scalies.

Arliss and Santee scrambled from the boat to help pull it farther onto the grass. Krysty, J.B. and Jak alighted. Abner shut down the motor and followed. Mildred grabbed J.B. and hugged him until he winced. Then with her arm around his waist he turned to share quick, warm cheek pecks with Krysty.

“I'm so proud of you all,” she said. “You played it perfectly.”

“Ace job of acting scared out there,” Avery said, slapping Abner on the shoulder.

“
Acting
scared?” Santee asked. He rumbled a distant-thunder laugh.

“Not a lot of acting required,” J.B. said, “when there's stickies so close you can smell them.”

“You handled the boat perfectly, Abner,” Nataly said to the cox'n and bosun's mate. “You would have fooled me that you stuck the dinghy on that wreckage by accident because you flipped out.”

Abner just bobbed his head and mumbled, “Thanks.” He seemed embarrassed at the attention.

“I thought our performance was mebbe a little broad, myself,” Arliss said, though he was smiling. “Like
something you'd see in a traveling show, overacting being scared all over the place.”

“I doubt stickies have refined critical senses,” Doc said drily. “Nor do they pay overmuch attention to the nuances of human emotion and behavior.”

“Unless they're torturing some poor bastard,” Jake said. “Then they pay plenty attention.”

“Stickies triple deadly,” Jak said, “but triple stupe.”

“And there you have it,” Avery said.

J.B. made a show of checking his chron, even though Mildred could tell he barely glanced at it.

J.B., you total bullshitter, she thought. You know to the second how much time has elapsed.

For a man who seldom had much to say, at times he sure showed a flare for the dramatic.

“Big surprise coming up for the stickies,” he announced, turning his gaze upstream toward the bridge. “In three, two, one—”

A fireball engulfed a horde of hooting, celebrating stickies. It in turn was instantly swallowed up by an expanding cloud of white smoke with a yellow sun at its heart.

“Now, that's something you don't see every day,” Santee said.

What the onlookers could not see from a quarter mile away was the twenty-pound black powder bursting charge going off. The blast sent a hundred pounds of rusted nails, sharp pebbles and broken crockery that had been packed around the powder keg in a larger barrel and covered with oil-soaked cloth sleeting through the bodies of scores of muties.

“They love fire and fireworks so much,” J.B. said, “let's see how they like being
part
of them.”

The smoke rolled upward in a ball to split and flow around the stump of the railway bridge. The bonfire had been blown out, but smoldering fragments lay everywhere. As did stickie bodies. And body parts.

The murderous show had been set off by a fuse that had been inserted in one end of a precious cheroot. Jak had lit it along with the oil-soaked cloth when he bent down. Because the cheroot would burn at a consistent rate, J.B. had calculated it should give him and his friends plenty time to get to safety and plenty time for stickies to join the fun.

J.B. disentangled himself from Mildred. “Right. It's time to go back to the scene of the crime for the mop-up. Make sure the nest is cleared out.”

“Want me and Santee with you again?” Arliss asked. He was feeding fresh black powder cartridges into the side-gate in the receiver of his carbine.

“Yeah,” J.B. said. “Mildred, Krysty and Doc, you come along, too. There's just room in the launch for you.”

“If everybody's friendly,” Abner said, “since Santee's double large. We can make it for this short jaunt, though. No problem.”

“I've got to warn you, ladies and gentlemen,” J.B. said, “after we get the nest cleaned out, break time's over. The real work starts, and the last easy day was yesterday.”

And I'll save the breath it would cost me telling you I don't like your plan, Mildred thought, just because it
was something the slave-owning Confederates did two hundred years ago. Neither you nor anyone else but Doc would even understand.

“Nope,” Manda Kwon said, holding up the rad detector with her floppy hat over it to shield its vanes from the light of the scorching noonday sun. “Not detecting any rads yet.”

“What we want to be concerned with,” Ryan said, “is the crocs that infest these bayous. They'll chill us quicker than the hot spots. Or any but the hottest, anyway.”

His skin crawled at the fact that he like the rest was wading hip deep through one of the myriad little channels twisting their way through the bogs inland east of the Grand Fleet's anchorage.

Still, he missed his lapel rad counter, which presumably—hopefully—was with Krysty and the others back at the
Mississippi Queen
right now. Because it was attached to his coat.

He was leading a party of seven New Vick sailors—or rather, six sailors and one sec man—down a nuke-forsaken bayou in the ostensible hope of finding a way to outflank the Poteetville fleet.

Despite the offer of the choicest available blasters from the armory, including black powder lever-action repeaters like the ones Baron Tanya's sec men carried,
Ryan had picked a double-barreled, sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun to augment his SIG. The Baroness, in her real if carefully doled-out gratitude, had provided him smokeless ammo and even a 15-round magazine. But as a primary weapon, he thought the sawed-off gave him the best option for surprises of the up-close-and-personal kind.

Shaking her head, Manda put her hat back on and stowed the glass globe with its miniature four-blade-weather-vane assembly back in its padded box. She didn't put it away in the light pack she carried, same as all the rest of them. She didn't seem willing to let go of her treasure.

“Does that thing even work?” Mohoric asked. Like most of the unit he carried a Springfield trapdoor blaster with a carbine-length barrel. It wouldn't have been Ryan's choice even among breech-loading smoke-poles, but it seemed to be the basic weapon issued to Grand Fleet landing parties.

Ryan led them slowly forward as Manda tucked the box back under her shoulder. Almost at once a flock of cattle egrets took startled flight from off to their right, squawking and flapping almost over their heads as they ducked fast and cursed.

“It works,” Manda insisted. She carried her M1873 slung.

“How do you know?” Chief Petty Officer Jarvis Jones asked from the rear of the file. The young and handsome black man was one of Baron Tanya's sec men, not a common sailor. His manner was flippant and
often abrasive, although he seemed competent enough to back his brash self-assurance.

Ryan was at least sure he was assigned to be his babysitter. The baron of New Vick was not a trusting person. Whether that was paranoia, justified or unjustified, Ryan as yet had no objective evidence.

“It works,” Ryan said. “I've seen them before. What I wonder is where you get one of those things in this day and age?”

“They're not that hard,” Manda said defensively. “Blow a glass, suck the air out, stick one of these little propeller doohickeys with the panels black on one side, white on the other. Seal it back up airtight. No great shake.”

“If you say so,” Pottz said.

“Lotsa craftsmen in the ville could do it. My family could, if you gave us the right equipment.”

“How far are we supposed to go, anyway?” Mohoric asked.

“Two miles inland, is what I was told,” Ryan said.

He glanced up at the sky. Chem clouds seemed to be approaching out of the west.

“How far have we gone, then, sir?” Jones asked.

“Beats the glowing nuke shit out of me,” Ryan replied. “There's no way to tell. Unless one of you has got some way of measuring distance that I don't know about.”

That brought a chorus of nos, as expected. “If anybody does, it's Manda,” Jones said. “How about it, Mandy?”

She shook her head. She looked more than a little
miffed. “You been keeping your sketch map up, Atcheson?”

“Yeah,” the weedy blond man said in his nasal voice. “What I can't understand is, why me?”

“Because the new junior loot told you to, Earl,” Jones said.

“I got told somebody had to do it,” Ryan said. He could have chosen to get pissed at the chief's manner, skirting insubordination pretty closely as it did.

Instead he grinned. “And it wasn't going to be me. Shit rolls downhill.”

“Welcome to the Grand Fleet,” Pottz said.

“What I don't get,” said Boggert, another black guy who came from small-boat river people south of New Vickville proper, “is what we're supposed to accomplish.”

“We got ordered to look for a way to go sneaking up on the P'ville pukes,” Pottz said.

“But what's the point of carrying on past the point we could even bring the rowboats? If they won't make it this far, and we all know they won't, a patrol steamer sure as nuke won't. Much less the
Pearl
.”

“Orders,” Ryan said. “They said two miles. If we find a likely route, then mebbe the baron will look into dredging out a channel to get boats to it.”

“The
Pearl
? She draws so much she has to keep a leadsman working constantly in the bow to keep from getting grounded on a sandbar, and that's in the big river!”

“The details are far above my pay grade,” Ryan said. “Feel free to ask Baron Krakowitz when we get back.”

Boggert hastily shook his head. “You mean she didn't tell you that, Lieutenant Cawdor?” Jones asked. “Thought you were the Hero of the Fleet, after that little fandango last week.”

“Yeah, well, this is what that gets you. In turns out. You might keep that in mind.”

He wasn't happy to be reminded how long he'd been held in the Grand Fleet. He may not be a prisoner, as such, but until he had a way to spring his friends from the rad- and stickie-infested trap they were stuck in, he stubbornly refused to leave.

Fact was, he was more than a little disappointed. He thought that maybe his feat in foiling the Poteetville sneak attack might've been enough to buy them all a ticket out. Instead he was tramping pointlessly around the same swamp complex. Even if it was less radioactive—if Manda's glass gadget worked.

“I still don't see the point to sloshing half a mile or more in this slop,” Boggert said. “Any channel we find's liable to move next time it rains. And then Earl's map won't be worth runny dog crap. And it's fixing to rain, in two hours, max.”